Maybe you’ve read Dr. John Sarno’s theories about TMS, or Tension Myositis Syndrome (also called Mind Body Syndrome by some people), and you really want to implement them into your healing process. This is a great idea, because many mindfulness and meditation-based mind-body healing methods, while extremely helpful, can’t quite take you to the finish line. I’ve found, for myself and for my clients, that Dr. Sarno’s work bridges an important gap between spiritual/holistic healing and Western medicine. It helps the mind understand how the mind itself can create and perpetuate physical pain (not consciously, of course!) and gives logical reasons and practical steps for people who are trying to embrace mind-body/spiritual healing but feel a little stuck.

The great news is, to implement the core and essential methods in Dr. Sarno’s approach, you only really need two things.

Your Mind-Body Shopping List

1. A pen
2. A notebook

That’s right – one trip to the dollar store and you are all set! Everything you really need is already inside of you, and mind-body healing is actually very simple. It can feel challenging, just because you are learning something new. And, you’re learning something that goes against much of what you’ve learned throughout your life about how the mind and body work together. (This was actually my favorite thing about Dr. Sarno’s work – it was so different and so striking that it felt freeing, and it gave me hope that I could truly heal.)

Once you’ve completed your shopping trip, here’s what you’ll want to do with your supplies.

Two to three times a day, stop what you are doing and ask yourself this question: What am I feeling emotionally right now?

Take a moment to check in with yourself, and be curious about what is going on in your emotional world. If you don’t feel anything right now, think back to the last hour or so, or last few hours. See what you may have been feeling recently, but weren’t aware of while you were busy with daily life.

Let yourself feel the emotion for a few minutes, without doing anything other than just noticing what it feels like to have that emotion right now.

At the end of the day, take ten minutes to write anything you noticed as a result of doing this exercise, as well as anything you feel you need to express.

This simple exercise is the root of all the mind-body tools, and is powerful enough to create pain relief all on its own. Really!

The mind often wants to complicate mind-body healing, but it always comes back to one thing: feeling emotions.

Dr. Sarno’s work is so groundbreaking because it describes the connection between pain in the body and suppressed emotion. In short, he explains that the unconscious mind tries to protect us from strong emotions that are a result of life pressures. It protects us from being vulnerable by keeping us unaware of the inner workings of the unconscious mind and our deepest emotions, conscious or unconscious. The mind has the ability to create a pain syndrome that, in essence, both distracts us from our inner emotional world and alerts us to an imbalance within the psyche – a call to connect inward, in a sense.

This one concept is the most important key to remember as you embark on your mind-body healing journey. It’s easy to forget, so you’ll want to come back and review it over and over again, on a daily basis, to help you stay on track.

When I decided to coach and help others with the application of mind-body healing techniques, I wanted to create enough resources to support people in all different situations. If you don’t feel like you have extra money right now, I want you to know that you can read my blog, (there are tons of past posts that will help you out!), use this simple tool from today, and get well. I’ve heard from many people who have done just that, without ever even signing up for coaching or programs (which can certainly be helpful, but there’s no need to feel stress if that’s not a possibility for you right now).

Most of all, I want you to feel encouraged and supported, however we cross paths. I’ve been in your shoes, and I know the challenges you have and are facing, and I also know that you can absolutely get well.

Every year, the Mind-Body Coaches in my Mind-Body Coach Training offer free coaching in order to gain experience. This is a great opportunity for you to get coached around everything I’ve described above! See the details below if you’re interested.

Abigail

Would you like free mind-body coaching? If you’re struggling with a pain syndrome, health, stress, or you’d just like to apply the mind-body tools to your life, now is your chance! The 2015 Mind-Body Coaches -in-Training are practicing their coaching skills, and we are offering YOU free coaching! If you would like to be added to our list of available clients for the coaches-in-training please fill out this form. (Opportunity ends 9/5/15.)

I’m afraid that this approach won’t work for me, and I’ll be the only one, ever, who fails at this.

I can’t find my emotions – I feel blank.

I’m afraid to feel my emotions, but I know I need to/have to in order to heal.

I’m researching all the TMS/Mind Body Syndrome/Sarno resources and now I don’t know what to do.

I feel like a big mess.

I can’t figure out what to do next on this healing path, and I feel like I’m not healing at all.

I have to do all these things in order to heal, but it’s completely overwhelming!

Ever had any of these thoughts? Today? Five minutes ago?

Let’s just start with this: These are all completely normal thoughts that come up for most of us who embark on a healing journey using the Mind Body Syndrome (TMS) approach.

The mind has a tendency to try to figure things out, get it right, and achieve a goal. In this case, that looks like trying to achieve pain-relief by getting the mind-body tools “right.”

Unfortunately, as noble as this goal is, it actually causes you much suffering and stress (and makes it harder to find relief). Trying to do things right is actually part of the self-pressure habit that creates stress on your system and results in pain.

Yeah, I know! Catch-22!

So, what the heck can you do about this?

Start by using this tool from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy:

Whenever you notice yourself caught up in thoughts like the ones above, say to yourself:

 “I notice I’m thinking….[fill in the thought here].”

This seems very simple and banal. It’s actually one of the most powerful things you can do.

By repeatedly noticing your thinking instead of actually getting tripped up by your thinking, you slowly create the ability to see past the scary thoughts.

Your inner wisdom starts to sneak in and help you discover what feels right for you in any given moment.

I don’t see any of the mind-body tools and approaches as “have-to’s” at all. When I’m working with my clients, I know that there’s at least a hundred ways to play this game, and what I’m looking for is what resonates the most with the individual client. We are all unique. We all learn differently. I see the tools (mine and others’) as a giant a-la-carte menu. Pick one item off the menu and eat it every day for a week. See how that tastes. Eventually, you’ll start to know which tools are your faves and which are most helpful for you.

One tool, used for a short amount of time each day and practiced regularly for a few weeks, will have a huge impact. It’s much more effective to do that than to try to do a whole bunch of things, overwhelm yourself, and feel stress.

Learning to feel emotions for the first time, learning to stay aware of the body, and listening to inner wisdom can all take some time. Those are really the basic components you need in order to heal, and there are lots of ways to approach those components.

The best approach for healing TMS is to keep it simple.

The thing is, a goal-oriented approach full of self-pressure and trying to do it right doesn’t work in this situation. It’s what we’ve learned to do, and how we usually achieve what we want. This is a time when you’ll start to learn a totally different way to arrive at something you desire. It’s more like sidling up sideways to what you want and accidentally falling into its lap. You can’t chase it, hunt it, or go after it. Instead, you really do need to relax into it and let it simply happen.

I know – that’s much easier said than done! The key is to get interested in what’s going on in your emotional world, your psyche, and your inner life – with gentleness and curiosity. Notice the different ways your mind pressures you each day, using the tool above. Just notice. That’s all! The more you notice, the easier it becomes to shift into new ways of treating yourself that don’t involve self-flagellation.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, afraid, and worried, start with the tool above. You might also take one minute a day to notice your feet. Pay attention to the fact that you have feet (or hands, if your feet are in pain). This is a simple mindfulness practice that helps you begin to befriend your body again. You’re not “trying to do anything” with your feet – you’re just being aware that you have them.

You might have noticed that the trick to all this seems to be noticing! You’d be right.

Noticing is the antithesis of pressuring.

The more you just notice, without doing anything else, the more you can sidle up to pain-relief and fall into its lap.

This mind-body healing journey is not about doing more, doing it right, or succeeding. It’s about discovery and embracing gentleness toward yourself. Whatever you’re doing right now, even if it IS beating yourself up, simply notice and be gentle with yourself. Allow it all to be exactly as it is in this moment.

You can do this.

Abigail

P.S. Want help dealing with the overwhelm? Join the Kindness Community today and get ongoing support around using mind-body healing tools and taking the pressure OFF of yourself!

And, if you want to learn more about breathing (one of my fave basic tools!) for health and stress-relief, you may want to check out the info below. I studied basic breathwork with Kathleen and found it immensely helpful in dialing down pain. This is her first online training, which means you can take it from anywhere! I’m participating, as I want to go deeper into how to breathe to relieve stress and allow emotions to flow.

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Barratt Breathwork® Facilitator
Online Training

Expand your potential for personal and professional development. Whether you want to develop an in-depth personal breath practice, or train professionally, this 200-Hour Facilitator Training is designed for you.

Join Kathleen Barratt, founder of Barratt Breath Institute, and discover how to incorporate Barratt Breathwork into your professional practice. This foundational program complements and integrates with a wide variety of contemplative mind/body systems and is appropriate for both laypeople and professionals in various healing and self-development fields.

Online training tools, hands-on practicum, and live, online teaching sessions provide the theoretical and experiential framework for learning how to formulate and guide a progressive sequence of contemplative breath practices.

Having some exposure to breathwork, whether you have studied it or received breathwork sessions from a breathwork facilitator, is a prerequisite for this program.Upon successful completion, students will receive a Barratt Breathwork® Facilitator certificate.

This training is offered as a stand-alone program, as well as being a prerequisite for the Barratt Breathwork® Facilitator Graduate Program.

Self-kindness is the biggest healing factor in pain-relief, stress-relief, and connection to one’s soul and inner wisdom. It’s been my biggest struggle.

In my twenties, I went on diets constantly, I pushed myself to do more, more, more, was incredibly hard on myself, and I ignored anything my body had to tell me. In fact, I had no idea my body was even speaking to me.

I was depressed, in pain all the time, exhausted, and unhappy.

I remember once visiting an orthopedic surgeon for a consult about intense knee pain. At the time, I was on a strict diet, dealing with major stress in my life, over-exercising, pushing myself to succeed in my career, judging myself constantly about my abilities, and generally angry with myself. Gosh, it was such a mystery, that knee pain. I spent a lot of time going to doctors in those days. (Although, in that case, the knee doc looked just like George Clooney, so it wasn’t much of a hardship.)

Now, many years later and several thousand lessons later, I still often struggle with self-kindness.

Sometimes, I really suck at it. (Oh wait – that’s not exactly the kindest way to put that…)

My first go-to is often the same ol’ self-judgment, self-pressure, and ignoring-my-inner-wisdom habit.

Luckily for me, I teach self-kindness every day, all day. This forces me to be honest with myself about where I really am in the self-kindness spectrum. Every client I work with, every class I teach, and everything I write is pretty much Big Wisdom coming through for myself, not just for others. I never feel like I’m the one teaching or coaching. I feel like the translator just sharing wisdom, and I’m clear that my job is to listen and follow through on what I’ve learned each day.

This is actually pretty cool. The cure for pain syndromes, stress, and mind-body-soul disconnect is self-kindness. I get to experience that cure every day, even when I forget.

It’s pretty easy to forget to practice self-kindness. Self-kindness isn’t usually our first go-to when life happens. And, if your life is like mine, life happens every day. There are mistakes, lessons, discomforts, struggles, surprises, and more at any given moment. Self-pressure can sneak in like nobody’s business. Suddenly, you realize you’re being hard on yourself!

Here’s today’s homework: What can you do to remember to practice self-kindness? What would help you focus on this each and every day?

For me, the work I do is an automatic reminder. I also have a schedule that includes five minutes each day of the self-kindness practice I teach in the Kindness Community.  I also have friends who are willing to remind me to be kind to myself.

What would work for you? What are your ideas? Share below or on Facebook!

This is the ESSENTIAL focus you need each day if you want pain relief, stress relief, and a strong connection to your inner wisdom. As a bonus, you’ll also find yourself awakening more and more to your true nature and spiritual connection.

If you want reminders and support, how-to’s, and help around this self-kindness idea, hop on over to join the Kindness Community!

Abigail

P.S.  Having spent the last two weeks grieving the loss of my faithful furry friend and companion, Jackson, I wanted to share this fabulous resource with you, below, around grief and healing!

GRIEF & CREATIVITY SUMMER PLAYSHOPS!

The Creative Grief Studio are hosting an array of wonderful grief and creativity “playshops” this Summer, exploring different creative ways to express and transform grief through dream work, clay work, photography, journaling, collage, book-making, creative writing, guided visualisations, intuitive painting, mandalas, and more.

Great for a bit of introspection and creative exploration of your own grief from losses of any kind, or for coaches wanting to learn more creative tools for supporting grieving clients. Have a look and see what looks yummy to you, for a bit of play, creativity, and reflection this Summer…

Do you ever have days when your inner critic just won’t stop? When you beat yourself up for pretty much everything, from your hair to your clothes to that thing you said that was really, really ridiculous (Oh God, you’re still cringing), to your parenting to your work performance…and on and on and on?

I never have those. (Said with much sarcasm.)

Recently I found myself criticizing myself over my lack of organization in my fridge, accidentally plopping my toddler into a cold bath, and forgetting I was texting in the middle of a texting conversation. Inner critic emergency!  I decided it was time to use a mind-body tool to quiet the ol’ critic.

Once you start recognizing when you are beating yourself up or judging yourself, you have opened the window to do something different with your mind. It might feel like you’ve just cracked the window, but I promise, you’re letting in some fresh air!

At first, you might notice that it takes you several days or even weeks to catch on to self-judgment. The more you practice noticing, the easier it gets. Eventually, you’ll see your mind start to turn down the self-judgment path and you’ll swiftly choose a different route.

Here’s an example. In the past, stepping on the scale used to be a catalyst for self-judgment for me. Whether it was up or down a few pounds hardly mattered. If I’d gained a pound, my mind spewed out terrible comments on my ability to control my eating and how terrible I looked. If I’d lost a pound, my mind would immediately jump to, “Well, this certainly won’t last.”

After practicing and working on self-kindness very specifically for the last couple of years or so, I’m able to choose something much nicer – before my mind even starts down those other roads. And the miraculous thing? I actually believe the kind words. That is the result of a lot of repetition. You might not believe your kind words to yourself at first, even if you’re saying them. And that’s okay! The more you practice, the easier it gets.

A couple weeks ago, I stepped on the scale to find a couple-pound increase. Instead of the old self-criticism, my mind went to this: “Hmmm. That’s interesting. I wonder why I’ve been overeating?” This curiosity led me to discover that I’d been avoiding some sadness and anger in the grief process and trying to suddenly be “done” grieving. What great information!

This was all a result of me asking that question from last week’s post: What is the kindest thing I could say to myself right now?

In the past, I would have applied force. I would have said, “Now you MUST stop overeating and exercise MORE this week.”

Just when you think you need force – you need more kindness. More force will only make it harder to know why whatever is happening is happening, and you’ll just want to rebel against it, anyway. The key is to shift that habit. As you feel yourself amping up into self-flagellation, see if you can downshift into kindness. Feel the difference in your body when you do that. Notice how much tension force and self-criticism create, versus the relaxation and relief of kindness.

If you’re ready to practice more self-kindness, you might enjoy the following exercise. I call it the I’m Awesome list. If that sounds egotistical, don’t worry. It’s not. I’ve found that with habitual self-criticizers, it’s pretty much impossible to create arrogance. The pendulum is swung so far to the self-criticism side that it would take some serious effort to get it all the way over to arrogant jerk.  In fact, by actually embracing your awesomeness, you’re less likely to be myopically focused on your own shortcomings. Therefore, you end up being more present with other people. You’ll actually be less self-focused and more loving and compassionate toward others.

Here’s how you do it:

Get a notebook or huge peace of paper. At the top, write: The I’m Awesome List. Each day, add 1-3 specific reasons you are awesome. They can be seemingly small or incredibly huge. Whatever works for you goes on the list. If you need a little help getting started, enlist a friend. You’ll start her list, and she’ll start yours. Once you’re rolling, you’ll find it’s easier and easier to think of reasons you are awesome. (If you find this incredibly difficult, you can start with an “I’m Sort of Okay” list and work your way up to the I’m Awesome List.)

Yet, good old pain is really trying to help you out. It’s just that sometimes we’re not clued in to what it’s trying to say. We’re awake, but we’re mainly focused on getting the damn alarm to stop buzzing.

One of the MAJOR messages behind physical and all other pain is this: You are somehow, somewhere, not admitting important wants or needs to yourself. You are not fully letting yourself be who you really are. You are squelching something, somewhere, within you.

My fave new phrase is: you are not letting your soul sing. As a musician, I just love the idea that we all have a unique soul song. The world is our stage, where we all get to make music, and we all get to sing our unique soul songs. Then we get to join together and make really cool harmonies. It’s a soul choir, this human experience!

If you’re not letting yourself admit your own needs and wants, you can’t truly sing. And I, for one, want to hear your song. Nothing is more uplifting than spending time with a person who lets themself be fully who they are. Think about it. Don’t you know someone who just IS who they are? Aren’t you just magnetized to them?

Of course, there are levels of letting your soul sing. You might start quietly, with a pianissimo. Eventually, you’ll get a little louder. Mezzo-forte, in musician speak. Then, eventually, you’ll be blasting a full-on forte. It doesn’t matter. Sing quietly, start softly, but sing.

How, you ask?

Start now by asking yourself what you actually, truly, really want in this moment. Then do it. Repeat.

Huh. That’s awfully simple. It’s a real head-scratcher, alright. Because it actually works. Yes, everyone around might think you’re crazy/silly/loony/insert your word here. I really can’t imagine why this would be more important than you letting your soul sing, especially if you are experiencing the waker-upper face-slap from pain. Really – would you rather squelch yourself and feel awful but deny it and pretend everything is okay until one day you have screaming pain of some kind and can’t get rid of it? Or…let people say what they will and enjoy the freedom of taking care of yourself honestly, deeply, and truly by doing what you actually want to do. Day by day.

I’m teasing you a little just because I’ve done it too. I’ve smooshed, squelched, squashed, shoved, and otherwise ignored major and important parts of myself. Until my body refused to let me do it anymore. Until my physical, mental, and emotional anguish was too much, and I had to start being the real me. Until singing my soul song was essential to my well-being.

Yes, I still sing quietly sometimes. It’s not about doing it perfectly. It’s just about singing. It’s just about letting your soul out of self-imposed prison.

So – what do you want, right now? Honor it. You are the only one who can truly bring what you want into your life. It’s time to start. Or, maybe it’s just time to do it more often.

I’m not kidding. What do you want? Tell me in the comments below! Sometimes it helps you start when you write it down or say it out loud.